


Ice Blind

by toli-a (togina)



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Implied/Referenced Torture, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-20
Updated: 2016-06-20
Packaged: 2018-07-22 09:05:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 495
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7428580
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/togina/pseuds/toli-a
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's better in the chamber, he knows, once he remembers enough to swallow it down.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ice Blind

**Author's Note:**

> I believe the original tumblr prompt was something along the lines of, "Given Among the Lilies (see the togina works), how would the Winter Soldier react to suddenly being blind?" Which, being me, I promptly undermined, and thought, "He probably wouldn't care. He's _owned_ , and if his handlers would like to take away his sight, that simply is. It's quieter without it, and the dead appreciate their peace." ... Yeah, this isn't cheerful.

For the first months, his handlers do not know what to do with him. (They do not realize that he understands them, when they speak – there is a flash of a large, brown man reading documents aloud, pointing at the horizon and teaching him words.) They debate returning him to his masters. They say that  _ they  _ are his masters, and he thinks that the other masters were kinder, there is a moment where he closes his eyes and sees a weathered, tan face and a glass of something strong, sitting on a starched cot in a dirty tent.

Someone dies, after the first month, and suddenly no one is suggesting his return. (The man who dies is called The Captain, just as the doctors who cauterized his arm referred to him as The Prize.) After that, they leave him in his room, studying him through the bars and muttering about orders from their own master far away.

It’s when their master comes to visit that he begins to see things, at night when he closes his eyes. There is a thin man with a dark, thin mustache, giggling delightedly at the explosions scattering ash and debris onto his head. There is a slender woman the color of the skin at his hips, where it is almost the exact shade of his walls. She sings songs with words he doesn’t know, cradling a small child in her arms.

His handlers tell their master – a small, shiny man with a head as round and pale as a toilet bowl – that he is talking in his sleep. They take him out for experiments, as the master calls them. When the pain is too much, he closes his eyes and drifts away.

There is a golden man. A red-cheeked little boy, with the same blue eyes and pink ears as the man, the same curled fists and clenched jaw. He wakes up with the name on his lips, screaming it as he wrestles for the first time with his restraints.

They don’t have the secrets to his body, in 1945. They don’t know how to recreate the soldier he had been: they don’t know how to build limbs, or how to amputate memories once he’s dreamed them. (He decides they will never have the secrets to his mind. He will shut them away, first, will lock the door and throw away the key.)

Their master is disappointed in them, breaks everything in the room with a clatter when they insist that they need more time. That they know how to keep him – how to preserve him, like vegetables in brine – until they can remake him as a prize.

He doesn’t fight the chamber, even when the viscous fluid forces his eyes shut, sends off starbursts of light when it covers his nose and mouth and he can no longer breathe. He can’t see, but they can’t hear him, either, and the images are clearest when he closes his eyes.


End file.
